(The following three interviews are entirely fabricated. Do not believe rumours. Do not spread rumours.)

1. The young man who heroically pulled his girlfriend away

“It was courage erupting in the space of an instant, I suppose,” he said. The thin, polite big boy—who always has his sideburns removed at the barber's and habitually hangs his keys from his belt—admitted that at the time he gave little thought to the consequences of his actions. His only thought was to protect his woman. As Hu Bian says, “Protecting women is a man's instinct.”

He recalled that the moment the criminal in the green jacket slapped the woman in white, he keenly recognised the danger of the situation. Although by then a case of beer was already inside him, he retained full command of his reason, carefully analysed the scene, and retreated in small steps.

Regrettably, his girlfriend, being comparatively emotional, understandably lost her composure. First she threw herself into his arms, her feet stamping in frantic little steps. When the woman in white was dragged outside, she made a momentary attempt to rush back.

He admits that remembering it still frightens him. Had he not stopped her, she might have charged into the criminal gang and, like the woman at the centre of the circle, had her hair pulled; been struck with beer bottles, kicked, stamped on, even thrown onto the stone steps to land on the back of her head, her brains spilling like beer across the entrance of the barbecue restaurant.

Fortunately, he restrained her. How fortunate that she had him.

Of the astonishing strength with which he dragged his girlfriend away from the group assault, he said modestly that ordinarily he could not be called a strong man. Only his absolute determination never to allow his girlfriend into a scene of violence revealed an arm strength that surprised even him. Men are weak by nature; as husbands, they become strong.

He carried her a great distance, even hiding in a blind corner of the street. Only after repeatedly looking back and confirming that the drunken men remained absorbed in beating the woman on the ground, and were therefore unable to pursue them, did he slow his pace.

His girlfriend trembled in his arms. He held and stroked her. Like a pair of crazed lovers, they left no space between their bodies. Understandably, uncontrollably, she wept.

It's all right, he comforted her. We're safe now.

2. The calm and collected man at the next table

Never flustered by events, unmoved by favour or disgrace. The man with a skull printed on the back of his T-shirt, who remained majestically still from beginning to end, drew widespread attention in the surveillance footage.

In sharp contrast, his friend at the table, a man of similarly enormous build, jogged to the cashier the moment the incident began, leaving the group in green jackets a broad space in which to conduct their beating. When Green Jacket accidentally slipped and the situation briefly eased, the friend seized the opportunity to retrieve his phone from the table and put it in his trouser pocket, then returned to the neutral position by the till to continue watching.

The man in the skull shirt never once left his seat. He did not even put out the cigarette in his hand, and as he watched, calmly flicked the ash twice.

After the group dragged the woman in white outside, he determined rapidly and accurately that the situation inside the restaurant was under control. He turned and called to his friend: All right, you can come back now.

Before the interruption, they had been discussing something truly momentous, something concerning the national destiny of countless countries. The farce had broken off their discussion, and his friend's undignified reaction made him question whether the man was qualified to be his interlocutor.

They had been discussing the war between Russia and Ukraine. The great strategic move in which Putin advanced by retreating.

Before his profound, immersive conjectures about President Putin's strategy, the flying fists, beer bottles, and plastic tables and chairs became scenery, an illustration, a crude account of the underlying logic of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. The winds of great trends blow across individual destinies. Sadly, of everyone in this barbecue restaurant—perhaps within ten kilometres—he alone understood this truth, just as he alone in all of Tangshan truly understood Putin.

He told his still-shaken friend that when he thought of strong ships and powerful guns, of heavy industry, of the judgement awaiting Ukraine, bridge between Europe and Asia, the blood, women's hair, and broken glass covering the ground struck him only as funny.

Amid the screams outside, he taught his friend how to remove the noise from life effectively, see the essence, and penetrate the truth.

3. The accomplice whose drunkenness prevented him from controlling his strength

He was found in a patch of bushes beside a road in another province. When discovered, he was squatting with his back to the road in a strange position: both arms passed beneath his knees to clasp his head, his entire body like a football, or an insect entangled in its own limbs. If someone kicked him, and there were no friction in this world, he would roll forward without end.

It was a position he often used when young. In those days, when men possessing bellies of his present dimensions approached and left him no route of retreat, he squatted down like this to submit, to accept his fate.

Later, sobbing bitterly, he confessed to his interrogators that he was not the kind of person they imagined. He was different from the perverse, indulged members of the criminal gang. He had suffered losses, too many losses; only then had he been forced to join them.

His status within the gang was extremely low. You can look through the earlier photographs of us raising baijiu glasses, he said. Either I am at the very edge or I am not in the frame at all.

Still sobbing, he stated that this time he had fully reflected on his mistakes. He had even exiled himself to an unfamiliar province to conduct ideological education upon himself.

The principal cause, the true culprit, was alcohol. Especially mixing drinks—beer and baijiu together. One became drunk very easily. And once drunk, he became a person completely opposite to his true self.

Whimpering but not without order, he explained that although being paralytically drunk prevented him from reasonably controlling the force of his fists and legs, the combined number of his kicks and punches was the second lowest of anyone present: no more than five. Those five blows arose because he saw Big Brother Zhao being attacked by a woman with a beer bottle. The woman's curses were also extremely unpleasant. From outside, he could not see clearly and mistakenly judged how the incident had begun.

He honestly recalled that Zhao, a criminal skilled in spreading malicious words and coercing his friends, seemed to experience a certain exhilaration as he dragged the woman outside by her hair.

Next, Zhao wanted to conduct an experiment on the spot: whether his hair-pulling or kicking was stronger. Then, who among the group could kick hardest. The strongest person would win. The agreed unit of measurement, understood by everyone without being stated, was the decibel level of the woman in white's screams.

To demonstrate his loyalty to Zhao, he explained, he was forced to use a degree of strength he would never ordinarily employ when beating someone.

His tears of remorse burst their banks. Alcohol ruins people, he said. A scourge. A cancer. From the bottom of his heart, he implored the relevant authorities to show leniency to the real him: sober, no longer coerced, burdened by a pitiable and unprivileged past.